The Book of Illumination (32 page)

We sent out the e-mail notice, then put a huge, scary sign on the door. Then, when five o’clock approached, we’d lock the door from the inside. For good measure, we might even find a can of the smelliest substance on the premises and leave it just inside the door. With the top off.

The only thing we hadn’t anticipated was a surprise visit from Sam, who arrived unannounced at five minutes of five. I glanced over at Sylvia, who shrugged helplessly. I could hardly blame her. I was the one who had urged her to call him. She obviously had. And here he was, happy as a clam to have been invited to drop by for a visit. The timing could not have been worse, but what could we do?

“Come in,” Sylvia said, as I hurried to close the door behind him.

“What are you doing with paraffin?” he asked.

The look I shot her said,
Be my guest
.

The look she shot back said,
No. You!

I let out a sigh.

He glanced back and forth between Sylvia and me. I must have looked as hangdog as she did, because after a minute, Sam said, “Would someone please tell me what’s going on?”

I took a deep breath. “Sam, can I ask you something?” I rolled a chair toward him.

“Yeeessss …”

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

“No,” he said confidently. “Definitely not.”

I glanced at the clock. Four fifty-eight. There were several ways to do this, but given the fact that I had to leave in a couple of minutes to meet Father Quinn and Bishop Soares, I opted to be direct.

“Well, then, you might find the next hour a little … unsettling. Because in about fifteen minutes, I’m going to be back here with two, plus a bishop and a priest, and—”

I looked over at Sylvia. She was nodding.

“And the four of us—or five, if you stay—are going to have a … a visit.”

Sam smiled, glancing from me to Sylvia and back.

“Aw, go on,” he said.

I nodded. “I don’t have time to explain now. I’ll be happy to later, but you have to decide pretty soon if you want to stay or not.”

“You’re pulling my leg,” Sam said.

“No, she isn’t,” Sylvia countered.

Sam’s smile began to fade. “Is it like an … exorcism?”

Given my mention of a priest and a bishop, I supposed his question made a certain amount of sense. I shook my head.

“A séance?”

“Nope, just a regular old conversation.”

“Between whom?” He gave me a tilted, suspicious look.

“Between …well, actually, it’s between the bishop and the monks, but since the bishop won’t be able to see them, I don’t
think
, I’ll speak for the monks. He’s coming because they don’t trust me.”

“Who? The ghosts or the monks?” He shook his head and said, “I can’t believe I’m asking that question.”

“The ghosts
are
the monks,” I said, pulling on my coat. “Or rather, the ghosts
were
monks.”

“They’re the monks who created the manuscript,” Sylvia volunteered. “They’ve stayed with it through all these centuries. They know some things they’ll only tell a bishop.”

I could see Sam trying to add two and two, and continuing to come up with three. “But … the manuscript’s not here,” he said slowly. “Is it?”

Sylvia shook her head. “We hope they know something that might help us find it.”

“Uh-huh,” Sam said.

I glanced at the clock. Five after five. I had to leave. Now.

“So you’re welcome to stay,” I said, “if you want. But if you’re not up for it, you can walk out with me.”

Sam turned to Sylvia. “Are
you
staying?” he asked.

She nodded. “I can explain a little more while she’s gone.”

“Okay,” Sam said, “I guess I’m in.” And then he added, “Wow!”

Father Quinn and Bishop Soares were standing beside a dusty green Subaru Legacy. I don’t know what model of car I expected, but I certainly expected it to be black. Priests always drove black cars. A bishop’s car, by rights, ought to have been really, really black.

I felt an unwelcome breeze of doubt blow into the underground garage. I knew that bishops who had been ordained as Jesuits sometimes continued to wear the robe of their order even after they were promoted, but the cleric who stood before me looked like the monk stirring the oversized vat on the label of Trappist jams. Could he really be a bishop? He seemed awfully … regular, an average man in his sixties with thinning gray hair. I wondered if maybe it was like returning as an adult to a room that loomed large in childhood, only to discover that everything about and within it seemed shrunken. I hoped he had some really convincing props in that bag he was carrying, in case the monks demanded proof of his ecclesiastical stature.

Father Quinn locked the car, but not before the ghost of a wan young woman had drifted out of the backseat. She looked sixteen or seventeen. Her long, curly hair hung in two thick braids, and she wore a flowered blouse with a little round collar and a jumper made of corduroy. The outfit appeared home-sewn. I didn’t make eye contact with her, though. I already had enough on my plate.

“Thank you so much for coming,” I said.

“Monsignor Dolan is a good man,” said Bishop Soares. “When he asks me to go somewhere, I go.” He spoke with a slight accent; he might have been Brazilian or Portuguese.

“It’s a very valuable book,” I said, “the book that’s been stolen. We think it might be the Book of Kildare.”

The bishop nodded slowly. Father Quinn didn’t look too thrilled to be here; the mention of the manuscript barely seemed to register. “His Excellency has had a very long day,” Father Quinn said, relieving the bishop of the satchel in his hand. “So if you’d be so kind as to lead the way.”

In other words, Cut the chitchat, sister, and let’s get this show on the road.

“It’s only a couple of blocks,” I said as we emerged from underground into the fading daylight.

Bishop Soares looked around, a smile spreading over his face as he took in the skateboarders and three-card monte hustlers and the rushing commuters envisioning the moment when they would be home, opening their doors to a wife, or a boyfriend, or a child, or a drink, or a long, lonely night in front of a glowing blue screen.

“Fall,” Bishop Soares said, pausing on the edge of the common and drawing in a slow, deep breath. I paused, too, and the breath I drew was cold and edged with the wood smoke of the season’s first fireplace fires, and there was the scent of coffee, good coffee, from No. 9 Park, and the odors of urine and fallen apples and pine mulch banked under the nearby bushes.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. He had quietly led me to a moment I would have missed, a moment in which I had stood absolutely still amid the beauty and bustle of the city in early evening and realized that I was alive, here, on earth, right this minute, as one season, in one of the finite number of years of my life, gave way to the next.

I no longer doubted that he was a bishop.

I had to go looking for the monks. You would have thought, given that they had been waiting for nearly nine hundred years to have a conversation with a live cleric, that they would have been all over the afternoon’s activities in the bindery. But no, they were nowhere to be seen. I found them in the first-floor reading room, hovering beside John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Annie Adams Fields.

The young monk saw me first. “Herself is here, Father,” I heard him whisper.

The abbot turned around. Fortunately, given the hour, there was no one in the room to observe me talking to the air.

“They’re waiting for you,” I said, trying to keep a exultant tone from creeping into my voice. “And they haven’t got all day.”

“Who?” snapped the abbot.

“His Excellency Bishop Esteban A. Soares, of the Diocese of Boston,” I informed him coolly. “And a senior member of his staff.”

“Where?” the abbot demanded. “They’re down in the bindery,” I said.

As I probably could have predicted, the abbot was impatient and rude. Did he thank me for delivering what he had requested, or rather,
demanded?
Not a chance. Wasting not a fraction of a millisecond, he disappeared. The younger monk, on the other hand, gave me encouraging proof that some mothers, even those in twelfth-century Ireland, manage to impart impeccable manners to their sons. He floated across the room, then silently kept pace beside me as I made my way down the hall and then down the stairs. I had no doubt in my mind that if he could have, he would have held open the doors.

It had been lucky, after all, that Sam had shown up, because when we entered the bindery, he was entertaining our guests with a charming history of the Athenaeum, describing the eccentrics and artists and visionaries and kooks who had all played their parts in its history. I would have loved nothing better than to have sat down and listened, but Father Quinn greeted my arrival with a curt little nod and a glance at his watch. It would have been so much fun to watch him fly out of his chair, if he could have seen the abbot pacing furiously behind him. On a couple of occasions, the older monk had reminded me of Rumpelstiltskin, but today he made me think, with a giggle I could barely repress, of Yosemite Sam.

“Maybe we should start with a prayer,” I suggested.

The bishop nodded. “Let us pray.”

The two monks fell to their knees, fairly quivering with anticipation.

“May Almighty God have mercy on us,” intoned Bishop Soares, “and guide our hearts and hands to the accomplishment of good, the appreciation of the day, and the adoration of God, our eternal Father in heaven. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.”

“Amen,” we all said, the Catholics among us also making the sign of the cross. The monks returned to a standing position, and everyone turned their attention to me.

I addressed the bishop and the priest. “Uh, I don’t know how much Monsignor Dolan told you about … how he and I met.”

“He told me enough,” said the bishop.

“So there’s nothing you’d like me to explain, before we start?” I asked.

“Ready to go,” said the bishop.

Father Quinn couldn’t resist a grumpy interjection. “You know, of course, the Church’s official position on ghosts.”

“I do. But once you’ve had an experience with an earthbound spirit—” I shrugged. “It’s the Church’s doctrine versus what you’ve seen with your own eyes.”

I could tell he didn’t like my answer. I wouldn’t normally do what I was about to do, but we really didn’t need ants at the picnic. I had to pick up Henry by eight.

I focused my attention on the spirit who had floated out of the car in the underground garage, and who had remained near Father Quinn ever since.

“Who are you?” I asked her.

“His sister,” she answered.

“What’s going on?” asked Father Quinn.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Kathryn Quinn,” answered the ghost. “But everyone called me Kat.”

I looked Father Quinn in the eye. “You had a sister named Kathryn. But she went by Kat.”

The expression drained from his face. He glanced around nervously. “What are you …?”

“Why are you here?” I asked her.

“Because he blames himself for the accident. We were hiking in New Hampshire, seven of us. We took some chances. But it wasn’t his fault, what happened. If it was anyone’s fault, it was mine.”

It was kind of intense just to lay this on the poor fellow, here in public with everyone around, but I couldn’t have him mucking up the works.

“She says it wasn’t your fault, the hiking accident. She says that if it was anyone’s fault, it was hers.”

“Kat!” he cried, spinning around. “Kat? Are you here?”

“She’s here,” I said quietly. “If you like, we can have a conversation with her later, in private.”

Instead of what I’d expected, a meek admission that there was something to my claim of being able to speak with spirits, the priest turned on me. “This is a trick,” he said. “A cruel trick. I don’t know where you dug up this—”

I glanced at the spirit of Kat. She understood that I needed help.

“Tell him that … say, ‘Tickles toppled the tower!’” she said, smiling at the memory of what had to be a private joke.

I didn’t have a clue as to what these words meant, but I did as she said.